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The Millennial Art Star Julie Curtiss’s Paintings Now Sell for Half a Million Dollars. It’s Kind of Freaking Her Out On a Wednesday in the middle of May, the artist Julie Curtiss was at her studio in a converted Bushwick warehouse live-streaming the afternoon contemporary art sale at Phillips. Slated at lot 16 was a one-by-onefoot painting that Curtiss had made about three years earlier, estimated to sell for between $6,000 and $8,000. Princess (2016) is typical of her output: a painting of a woman’s head, seen from behind, her hairdo done up in side cinnamon buns. It was the first Curtiss picture to be auctioned anywhere, and the young
artist watched the stream with some trepidation. When the bidding on her worked opened, paddle-wielders in the room and buyers on their phones quickly pushed the price past the high estimate, higher and higher, until it hammered at an astounding $85,000 ($106,250 with fees)—a 7,770 percent increase over the $1,350 paid by the collector who first bought it from an artist-run project space just two years ago.
In the span of minutes, Julie Curtiss became an art star, and she was giddy and also a bit horrified. “I was thinking, it’s scary, and I’m not making a buck on this,” she told me in her studio earlier this month. She was sitting on a stool, dressed in painting clothes and a coat. She chose her words carefully but they came out fast, tinted by a French accent chipped barely away by a decade in New York. A playlist was streaming on
